CarView

Your lifestyle. Your budget. Your Toyota.

Comment

🚗 CarView

Build Your Dream Toyota — a personalized car shopping experience powered by AI and financial intelligence.

Submitted to Toyota Track

💡 Inspiration

When we explored Toyota’s online car shopping experience, we noticed that it lacked a sense of personalization. The process felt more like browsing a catalog than finding a car that truly fits your life and finances.

We identified three main issues:

  1. No personal financial metrics. There’s no clear way to see which cars match your real-world budget or financing comfort zone.
  2. Hidden trims and configurations. Each model has many submodels, but they’re buried behind multiple clicks.
  3. Limited personalization. There’s no easy way to describe what you want in your own words — like “a sporty hybrid under $450/month” — and get relevant matches.

We wanted to fix that by building a new experience — one that combines smart financial insights, natural language search, and personalized recommendations.

CarView: Build Your Dream Toyota — a guided, intelligent car discovery and affordability platform designed to make car shopping simple, human, and financially transparent.

🚙 What It Does

CarView helps users find their ideal Toyota model by combining affordability calculations, intelligent filters, and AI-driven preference matching.

Key Features

  • Personalized Affordability Engine
    Users can input details such as monthly expenses, cash-on-hand, salary, and credit score. The system calculates an appropriate MSRP and monthly payment range for both buying and leasing options.

  • AI Car Matchmaker
    Using a hybrid of algorithmic filtering and large language models (LLMs), CarView interprets phrases like “fuel-efficient SUV for long commutes” and ranks Toyota models based on semantic relevance and fit.

  • Discover Hidden Builds
    All submodels and trim levels are surfaced directly — no extra clicks — so users can see the full Toyota lineup clearly and interactively.

  • Smart Filters + Chat Mode
    For users unsure of what they want, a conversational mode extracts preferences naturally. For others, traditional filters like MPG, horsepower, color, and price are all available in one place.

  • Side-by-Side Comparison
    Compare up to three vehicles with detailed specs, affordability data, and an AI-generated summary explaining which option best fits your needs.

🧩 How We Built It

We combined financial modeling, rule-based filtering, and LLM-powered semantic search into one unified platform.

  • Frontend: React + Tailwind CSS for a responsive, modern interface.
  • Backend: Node.js + Express handling filtering logic, affordability calculations, and LLM calls.
  • Database: PostgreSQL storing Toyota model data, trim metadata, and pricing.
  • AI Layer:
    • Uses embeddings to map user intent to car features and descriptions.
    • Extracts structured preferences from conversational text.
    • Generates natural summaries explaining recommendations.
  • Affordability Engine:
    Computes car affordability using real financial formulas.

⚙️ Challenges We Ran Into

  • Confining AI creativity: Ensuring that LLM outputs stayed factual and based on real car data, not hallucinations.
  • Balancing filters with natural language: Combining strict numeric filters (price, MPG) with flexible, semantic search (e.g., “family-friendly”) required careful weighting.
  • Financial UX complexity: Translating technical finance calculations into a smooth, approachable interface for users of all experience levels.

🏆 Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

  • Built a fully functional prototype that connects user preferences to real Toyota models.
  • Designed an interactive financial calculator that transforms basic income and expense inputs into meaningful car budget insights.
  • Integrated AI-driven preference extraction that allows shopping with natural phrases instead of dropdown menus.
  • Created a clean comparison view showing pricing, features, and payment ranges side by side.

📚 What We Learned

  • User empathy matters most. Even the most advanced technology must feel approachable and trustworthy for users making major financial decisions.
  • AI + structure is powerful. Combining semantic understanding with deterministic data filters gives both flexibility and reliability.
  • Design clarity drives trust. Showing affordability transparently encourages users to explore more realistically within their means.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates